Posts Tagged «robots»

Behold, the future of personal mobility devices: The Honda Uni-Cub. The Uni-Cub, which is self-balancing and has zero turning radius, is essentially a sit-on Segway without any handlebars. Most importantly, the Uni-Cub is much smaller and easier to maneuver than the Segway, allowing for Uni-Cub users to ride alongside or even within a pack of pedestrians. The main usage scenario for the Uni-Cub is moving around internal spaces, such as offices and museums: Not only is it easier and faster than walking, but compared to other personal mobility devices it also leaves your hands free to operate a smartphone or some other implement of your choosing.

Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT professor and one of the pioneers of social robotics, has unveiled “the world’s first family robot.” Called Jibo, the all-white desktop-sitting robot has more than a passing resemblance to a certain robot from a recent animated Pixar movie. The robot, which will cost around $500 when it’s released, will have a range of abilities that will hopefully make it the perfect companion to have around the house — such as telling stories to kids, automatically taking photos when you pose, easy messaging and video calling, providing reminders for calendar entries, and companionship through emotional interaction.

64 years after the father of computer science, Alan Turing, proposed a method of testing whether a machine has obtained human-level intelligence, a 13-year-old AI boy called Eugene Goostman has finally become the first artificial intelligence to pass the Turing Test. Don’t worry, though, sentient computers aren’t about to take over the world: The Turing Test is actually rather flawed, and doesn’t really measure an AI’s capability for intelligent thought.

Researchers at the EPFL in Switzerland have built one of the fastest robots on the planet. According to a press release, the multi-axis arm can catch all manner of crazy shaped objects in less than five hundredths of a second. That sounds pretty impressive, even looks impressive, but what else can it do?

The US Department of Defense, working with top computer scientists, philosophers, and roboticists from a number of US universities, has finally begun a project that will tackle the tricky topic of moral and ethical robots. This multidisciplinary project will first try to pin down exactly what human morality is, and then try to devise computer algorithms that will imbue autonomous robots with moral competence — the ability to choose right from wrong. As we move steadily towards a military force that is populated by autonomous robots it is becoming increasingly important that we give these machines, these AIs, the ability to make the right decision. Yes, the US DoD is trying to get out in front of Skynet before it takes over the world. How very sensible.

Google. When you read that word, the first thing you probably thought of was search. Considering Google accounts for around 70% of all web searches in the world (or about 85% of the English-speaking world), and has done for a decade, that’s not a huge surprise. Google is quickly diversifying, though; it’s dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket, after all. In the future, Google won’t be a search company at all.

NASA is preparing to take the next logical step after in-flight refueling between two aircraft — robotic refueling of orbiting satellites. This could extend the lifetime of many satellites indefinitely, and could play a very important role in preventing a Gravity-like scenario, where fragments of a single satellite cause a cascade of debris that destroys almost every satellite in Earth orbit.

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